The long term goal of this research is to formulate a more comprehensive model of the development of visual and auditory word recognition. To achieve this aim, we must investigate the role that different factors play in the identification of words by children as well as by adults (e.g., association-strength, graphemic-similarity, phonemic-similarity, relatedness-proportion, stimulus-quality, and word-frequency). The specific aim of this proposal is to elucidate the developmental changes that occur in the processing within and between the grapheme-phoneme, lexical, and semantic systems. More specifically, we propose to investigate: (l) whether spreading activation within and between the lexical and semantic systems is under strategic control; (2) the nature and time course of the influence of phonemic and semantic information on the lexical system; and (3) the time course of processing within the grapheme-phoneme system and the influence of the lexical system on its output.